BHS Corrugated Maschinen- und Anlagenbau – Modern Workplace with strong regional partners.

Challenge.

BHS Corrugated Maschinen- und Anlagenbau GmbH is a leading solutions provider to the corrugated board industry, growing considerably over the last decade with new colleagues joining the headquarters in Weiherhammer, Bavaria as well as the other international locations. For collaboration purposes, BHS Corrugated had previously been using various communications platforms, but these could no longer meet the demands of modern, digital, global collaboration, plus administration took up a lot of time and effort. With a central, modern platform, BHS Corrugated was looking to enhance communication and collaboration within the company, taking it to a new level by linking up all locations. And thus, the Modern Workplace project was born.

We wanted to enable our staff to collaborate digitally, globally and in a contemporary manner and were looking for a uniform communications solution that is easy to manage. It was essential for us that we realise this project with a central partner from this region.

Benjamin Lanzendörfer, Senior IT Program Manager Digital Workplace, BHS Corrugated Maschinen- und Anlagenbau GmbH

In an initial step, BHS Corrugated determined the long-term in-house strategies and objectives it wanted to achieve with new digital workplaces. It was clear that Microsoft 365 would have to completely replace the previously used tools in order to enable new ways of communication and innovative collaboration. It was also important to BHS Corrugated that employee communication and e-mails would in no way be impacted by the switch over. From the very beginning, the company was eager to involve its staff in the project. The various departments, IT, Works Council and data protection and data security teams were asked to share their points of view and work together to develop the project. The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 was a huge challenge for everybody involved as from one day to the next, admin staff all over the world were forced to work from home and attempt to tackle the project remotely, but still in collaboration with each other.

Solution.

Its search for a partner for the Modern Workplace project led BHS Corrugated to Bechtle. The local IT partner is backed by all the expertise of the entire Bechtle Group, giving BHS Corrugated a central, regional contact for all of Bechtle’s specialists. Together with HanseVision, a Bechtle Group company, BHS Corrugated also had a specialist for the transformation of outdated working environments into Modern Workplace solutions to turn to. HanseVision supported BHS Corrugated during the migration of its existing e-mail environment to Microsoft 365 Services and Exchange Online and the introduction of SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Outlook. One of Bechtle and HanseVision’s tried and tested frameworks provided a guideline for the implementation with a clear definition of goals, requirements elicitation, framework conditions and rules of the game coming centrally from Bechtle. The result was, when it came down to it, everyone knew what had to be done and how, while Bechtle and HanseVision took responsibility for time, budget, cost and resource management. In this way, an enormously complex project became much more simplified and numerous sub-projects were completed without issue. The switch over at BHS Corrugated’s global sites, including in the USA, China and Brazil, each took place over one weekend, in some cases without the need for staff being on-site. Active Directory and messaging migration also went off without a hitch. HanseVision was also on hand for the migration from Lotus Notes to Outlook ensuring that the switch over was not only successful from a technical point of view, but also in terms of the people using the program. Bechtle leveraged the Quest AD Migrator for the purposes of Active Directory consolidation and Quest Notes Migrator for the messaging migration. Other add-on tools, such as the Smart Permission Helper used by HanseVision, also facilitated project implementation and fulfilled all requirements not already met by Microsoft 365. COMMVAULT backup software was also installed, while Bechtle utilised Resource Central from Add-On for advanced resource management and catering.

Business benefits.

Thanks to the full support of Bechtle and HanseVision, BHS Corrugated was able to precisely achieve its vision and objectives for the Modern Workplace project. With their new digital workplaces, the employees can now collaborate and communicate more efficiently around the world. BHS Corrugated is thus closer to its customers and react more quickly and precisely to their personal needs.